BOOKS
LIFT AND SEPAR.ATE
Why is feminism still so divisive?
BY AR.IEL LEVY
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B ra burning-the most famous habit
of women's libbers-caused a fair
amount of consternation back in the sev-
enties, and the smoke has lingered. Wives
and mothers were torching the most in-
timate accessory of control; what might
they put a match to next? "Often today
those who cherish family life feel, even in
their own homes, under constant as-
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to the burning of draft cards at antiwar
marches, and a myth was born. In her
engaging tour d'horizon 'When Every-
thing Changed: The Amazing Journey
of American Women from 1960 to
the Present" (Little, Brown; $27.99),
Gail Collins quotes Van Gelder's la-
ment: "I shudder to think that will be my
epitaph-'she invented bra burning.' "
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A women's-liberation parade on Fifth Avenue, in New York, inAugust, 1971.
sault," the cultural critic Michael Novak
wrote in 1979. The goals of the wom-
en's-liberation movement, he saw, were
incompatible with the structure of the
traditional family. That's why bra burn-
ing became the most durable and unset-
tling image of modern feminism.
So it may be worth noting that it
never actually happened. In 1968, at a
protest against the Miss America pag-
eant, in Atlantic City, feminists tossed
items that they felt were symbolic of
women's oppression into a Freedom
Trash Can: copies of Playboy, high-
heeled shoes, corsets and girdles. Lindsy
Van Gelder, a reporter for the Post,
wrote a piece about the protest in which
she compared the trash-can procession
78 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 16, 2009
It's as if feminism were plagued
by a kind of false-memory syndrome.
Where we think we've been on our great
womanly march forward often has less to
do with the true coördinates than with
our fears and desires. We tend to imag-
ine the fifties and the early sixties, for ex-
ample, as a time when most American
women were housewives. "In reality,
however, by 1960 there were as many
women working as there had been at the
peak ofW orld War II, and the vast ma-
jority of them were married," Collins
writes. Forty per cent of wives whose
children were old enough to go to school
had jobs. This isn't just about the haze of
retrospection: back then, women saw
themselves as homemakers, too. Esther
4\.
Peterson, President Kennedy's Assistant
Secretary of Labor, asked a high-school
auditorium full of girls how many of
them expected to have a "home and kids
and a family." Hands shot up. Next, Pe-
terson asked how many expected to work,
and only a few errant hands were raised.
Finally, she asked the girls how many of
them had mothers who worked, and "all
of those hands went up again," Peterson
wrote in her 1995 memoir, "Restless."
Nine out of ten of the girls would end up
having jobs outside the house, she ex-
plained, "but each of the girls thought
that she would be that tenth girl."
There are political consequences to re-
membering things that never happened
and forgetting things that did. If what
you mainly know about modern femi-
nism is that its proponents immolated
their underwear, you might well arrive
at the conclusion that feminists are "ob-
noxious," as Leslie Sanchez does in her
new book, "You've Come a Long Way,
Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the
Shaping of the New American Woman"
(Palgrave; $25). "I don't agree with the
feminist agenda," Sanchez writes. "To
me, the word 'feminist' epitomizes the
zealots of an earlier and more disruptive
time." Here's what Sanchez would prefer:
"No bra burning. No belting out Helen
Reddy. Just calm concern for how women
were faring in the world."
The world that Sanchez has in mind
is really Washington, D.C. Sanchez has
a day job as a Republican political ana-
lyst; perhaps this is why she measures
progress solely by the percentage of peo-
ple with government jobs who wear bras.
Her great hope is that there will be a fe-
male President in her lifetime, and she
bitterly regrets that the former governor
of Alaska did not make it to the West
Wing. "Most of us are Sarah Palins to
one degree or another," Sanchez asserts.
Palin "so very clearly reflected the lifestyle
choices, hard work ethic, and traditional
values that so many women admire."
One sign of our cultural memory dis-
order is that you can describe a female
governor of a state as "traditional" and
not get laughed at. Conservative career
women are eager to describe themselves
in those terms. "I don't like labels, but, if
co
there's a label for me, it would be 'tradi- 8
tional,' and I'm very proud to be tradi- ì
tional," Cindy McCain told voters when
her husband was running for President.